Where do the news about US 2008 Presidential elections come from?

Depending on the analysis proposed, we use different set of newspapers where we look for news related with US Elections. In many of our analysis we look for news published in English.

In some cases we include articles produced in the main international languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and others. Articles written in Russian and Chinese are not included in our data base.

Analysis using worldwide newspapers include our main index referred to the media attention gathered by Barack Obama and John McCain. As show in the graph below, in those cases, some two thirds of the news come from USA newspapers. Another 4% is produced by Canadian newspapers. Press articles from European countries account for 17% of all US election news. Latin American countries are responsible for another 5% of the news we select for our analysis.

Looking at the origin of the news coming from the US, we provide in the next graph from which US States they come from. California newspaers are responsible for 13% of the news generated in the USA. New York newspapers come after with a national share of  9%. Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas and North Carolina produce alltogether another 21% of all news. The remaining 44 US states produce 57% of all news. The State weight of the newspapers we use in our date set are quite in line with the relevance of the states in terms of population and economic power.

A complementary analysis concerning the sources we use to calculate our measures of media attention refers to the kind of newspapers selected in our data set. We show the example referred to the US newspapers. This information can be shown for any other country included in our data set.

According to our estimations, top 10 newspapers by circulation produce some 2.5% of total US news. Top 10 newspapers are: USA Today,  Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chigaco Tribune, Washington Post, New York Daily News,  New York Post, Denver Post, Dallas Morning News.

Our data set includes 79 out of top 100 US newspapers by circulation. They represent 14.5% of all US news included in our analysis.  Another 2.2% come from top broadcasters and news providers, like Time Magazine, Newsweek, ABC News, Fox News, CNN News,  CBS News, MSNBC, Voice of America.

The remaining 83.3% come form other newspapers.

All in all we count with some 600 main newspapers and news providers in the data set concerning the US media coverage.